“I got a call from NBC and they said we made a mistake and we’re picking up the show,” Timeless executive producer Eric Kripke told the Comic-Con crowd today of how he found out May 13 that his time-travel series was not cancelled after all.

The panel actually kicked off with a specially produced video thanking the fans, both inside and outside the room.

NBC

On the bubble for most of spring, Timeless was canned by the Comcast-owned net on May 10 only to be brought back to life three days later. The series toplined by Matt Lanter, Abigail Spencer, Malcolm Barrett and Goran Visnjic scored a 10-episode Season 2 pickup, which is set to air next year.

“I was asleep and woke up to hundreds of emails,” Spencer said Thursday of how she found out about the eventual renewal, joking that at first she thought it was a gag and people needed to get over the cancellation.

“You play to win, you never design a season with like ‘maybe we’re not coming back,’ ” added Kripke when asked if he and co-creator Shawn Ryan had constructed the Season 1 cliffhanger finale as an end to the show as its fate was uncertain. “You write your way to victory,” he declared to another round of applause.

As for Season 2, which is moving from Vancouver to Los Angeles thanks to being awarded a tax credit from California’s $330 million program, Ryan hinted that things are coming together. “We’re at the beginning of the process,” he said. “We have ideas, nothing set in stone,” for filming schedule to start in November. “One thing I’m excited about in Season 2 is that we can dig deeper into the characters,” he added of Spencer’s history professor Lucy Preston, Lanter’s soldier Wyatt Logan, Barrett’s programmer Rufus Carlin, and Visnjic’s villainous Garcia Flynn.

Pulling back the curtain on Season 2 a bit more, Kripke said he wanted to emphasize how many of history’s players have been ignored due to prejudices of race, gender and class. “Lots of doubling down on that in Season 2 and presenting this idea that history is for everybody and America is for everybody,” Kripke announced.

Also in the panel, the audience was shown a blooper reel from the soon to be released Timeless Season 1 DVD.